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Why Lamar Odom Is Already Being Mourned

The sensitive, gentle, happy-go-lucky giant is beloved to every NBA player and every NBA fan.

Lamar Odom, full of Hennessy, herbal Viagra, and reportedly cocaine, found unresponsive in a Nevada brothel, was too tall to be airlifted from the local hospital. He’s currently hooked up to a ventilator; the famously anti-social Kobe Bryant, Odom’s teammate for two Lakers championships, and Khloe Kardashian, the ex-wifeapparently-still-current-wife who made an NBA cult hero into a household name, have been by his side.

It seems like ages ago that Lamar Odom first burst onto public consciousness as a top high school prospect. He was a joy to watch, a multi-skilled demon of a basketball player whose size and smooth, visionary game practically demanded Magic Johnson comparisons. The Queens-bred Odom was also very likely the last great homegrown talent to come out of New York City. After a perfunctory year of college, Odom was drafted fourth overall by the woeful Los Angeles Clippers in 1999. The Clippers had a strong youth movement going with Odom, Elton Brand, Corey Maggette, Quentin Richardson, and Darius Miles; they couldn’t crack the playoffs but were easily one of the league’s most entertaining—and on a good night, explosive—teams.

Odom, though clearly the team’s most important player, was oddly vacant. He could do almost anything on a basketball court but seemed reluctant to make plays, as if there were some other, less obvious path to stardom or some more oblique way to impact a basketball game that he was in the process of figuring out. Then came the suspensions for weed smoking and a lost 2001-2002 that transformed public perception. Odom had been a well-meaning, well-liked enigma. Now he was a bonafide fuck-up, if not quite a bust or a cancer. All those inexplicable decisions, all that potential kept under wraps—they became a symbol for everything that could go wrong with a modern day lottery pick. One of the most unique players in the NBA became a scapegoat for all the league’s perceived ills.

Who knows how this turn affected Odom. Certainly, he’d been through a lot already in life. His mother had died when he was twelve after an excruciating battle with colon cancer; his father Joe was junkie and wasn’t really in the picture. Maybe he was already numb to the world. But it always seemed like for Odom, this was just one more tribulation he had to get past. It’s not just that Odom persevered, eventually finding his way to the Heat and playing with a confidence and clarity that had been sorely lacking in Los Angeles. Odom got to Miami by sitting down with Donald Sterling to ask for the chance to start fresh somewhere else, rather than be retained as a restricted free agent. A man who could’ve long ago gone dead inside instead went to a deplorable scumbag with his heart on his sleeve.

That quality, as much as his intriguing style of play and the endless possibilities contained within it, is why Lamar Odom is so beloved among NBA fans of a certain age. He’s always come across as sensitive, even gentle. You could argue that it was to the detriment of his on-court performance, but then you’d be an idiot. Lamar Odom wasn’t just a good guy—he was someone who actually gave a fuck. He didn’t take things in stride or let them slough off too easily. Despite what some may have read into his play—especially when he came to the Lakers as part of the Shaquille O’Neal trade after only one year in Miami—Lamar Odom took things very seriously. It was endearing. And over time, the warmth many of us felt for Odom replaced any lingering disappointment in the player he had become. We were truly happy to see him contribute to those two titles in 2009 and 2010; his Sixth Man of the Year award in 2011 came as validation, as well as proof that Odom was no longer burdened by expectations. He was just free to play.

Of course, by this time, Odom was already a Kardashian, embroiled in their empire and supposedly working hard to build up his personal brand. Falling in with the Kardashians seemed to offer Odom the chance to work on some of the insecurity and uncertainty that plagued him at the time. Again, we have no way of knowing whether these feelings were proof that Odom was tortured all along and simply wore it well, or whether this was some superficial response to life in Los Angeles—the wayward talent getting wise to the reality of life as a professional athlete. Regardless, Odom became a regular presence on Keeping Up with the Kardashians and soon after, Khloe and Lamar became a hit in its own right.

This is the part where I stop and try to explain how hard it was for longtime Lamar Odom fans to make sense of all this. It wasn’t that Odom was somehow revealed as a bullshit artist, or less of a basketball purist than we’d previously imagined. It’s that Odom clearly needed something from the world of reality television that he couldn’t find in or around the NBA. Something was nagging at Lamar Odom even as his previous fans completed the cycle of rise, fall, and redemption on his behalf.

In some ways, Odom turning to reality television made perfect sense. His motivations, though, seemed to undermine exactly what made him such an exposed human being already. It turned his self-disclosure into a cash transaction and Odom started to come across as inaccessible or distant. He was a walking, faltering paradox: A brand based on authenticity of feeling; a professional athlete whose exact standing in the world of sports mattered very little; and an unforced individual trying to convert his life into content.

That’s really what it comes down to. Never before had Lamar Odom forced anything in his life or career. Never forced a play or wasted a possession. Never pulled a power move or tried to protest unfair treatment. That’s not to say that Odom was passive (though many have tried to make this claim) but that he let the world come to him—no mean feat for someone who had been screwed over so many times in his life. He was seemingly without defenses and his new life with the Kardashians put him on the defensive at all times—constantly on camera, living in the thick of all the drama that family brings with it, fighting to assert himself and his goals in the face of the larger agenda. If his choices were rooted in insecurity and panic, the Kardashian Industrial Complex only reinforced these feelings, especially when ultimate alpha dog Kanye West started lurking on the periphery.

Those of us who have followed him since the beginning can’t help but wonder: Is there a world where Lamar Odom’s story doesn’t end up here? Did those oft-discussed demons finally catch up with him, or did he find a new way of opening up wounds that had been staunched a long, long time ago? Coping was Lamar Odom’s stock in trade. Then one day, he just couldn’t do it anymore. More than anything else, that’s the tragedy of Lamar Odom’s story—no matter how it ends.